Use Randomized Timeout After Split Vote about raft HOT 2 CLOSED

Isn't it in theory possible for the cluster to always come to a split vote? Raft guarantees at most one leader per term, but makes no such guarantees about at least one leader per term.

from raft.

@tsenart , theoretically, sure: Raft will only elect a leader with probability approaching 1. The election timeout should be randomly chosen to prevent split votes with reasonable probability, then randomly re-chosen in case a split vote does occur. See http://ramcloud.stanford.edu/raft.pdf for details on the solution (comes up in the main text and again in the evaluation), and see the FLP impossibility result for why any consensus algorithm for asynchronous systems must have some kind of wart to deal with this.

from raft.